Utility Menu

Main menu

Our Services

Triad works with clients to build a custom approach.

Services

Executive Coaching

Coaching is the most tailored of all the work we do. It provides an opportunity to work one-on-one with individuals to enhance their communication effectiveness by raising awareness to their strengths and weaknesses, introducing different ways of approaching the situation, and developing new behavioral patterns through consistent accountability and refinement. Whether an executive is looking for help with a particular conversation or relationship, or on-going interpersonal skills coaching, we are known for our intellectual rigor, personal flexibility, creativity and clarity.

Why coaching?

Successful executives often rise through the ranks based on substantive and technical skills, but such skills don’t always translate into effective management. Attending a corporate education session or presentation introduces new ideas and provides an individual with tools to navigate their challenges. Whether independently or as a follow up to a live session, coaching affords the opportunity to drill down into the individual’s specific challenges. It helps an individual refine their understanding of the impacts of their behavior, examine their contributions, and figure out more effective and efficient ways of navigating challenging situations and relationships and getting the results they want. Coaching provides accountability to support the integration of new ideas and application of the tools to help facilitate real behavioral change.

What’s required?

In order for coaching to be effective, executives must be open to feedback and willing to experiment with behavioral change. They must know where they want to go, but be struggling with finding a way to get there effectively or efficiently. Without willingness, plus goals, coaching is a waste of money. With willingness – either in the form of curiosity or frustration – coaching accomplishes what other forms of executive education does not.

It reverses the executive feedback paradox (the higher you go, the less you get)

It provides “on the job learning”

It helps executives make rapid adjustments to changing assignments and circumstances

Mediation & Facilitation

We help people talk about tough issues and listen with an open mind as they untangle misunderstandings and differences in perspective, and work through strong and often unexpressed emotion. This process can vary significantly in length, from half a day to periodic conversations over many months. We design processes that support the client’s objectives and create forums in which individuals can work through divisive issues.

We’ve worked with:

Executive teams in conflict over crucial decisions

Family businesses struggling with succession issues

Project teams divided by clashing personalities

Business partners grappling with divisive issues like compensation, ownership, risk or work styles

Department heads with competing agendas

A key component of some hybrid solutions, these facilitated conversations allow groups to work through points of friction between specific individuals whose negative effect is impacting the team more broadly – and where unresolved, undercuts training or other skill-building efforts.

We’re also conscious that simply contacting someone to get help handling conflict in key business relationships can, in itself, feel like a risk. To help you understand where we come from, we include a few of our “core assumptions” when helping clients work through critical issues.

Core Assumptions

You may think your situation is hopeless. We don’t.

Our experience has been that in even the most emotional and intractable situations, progress can be made.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly. Our consultants have worked in highly-charged settings around the world. When the stakes are high, business issues often come linked with emotional and relationship issues. Equally importantly, we have difficult conversations of our own and know what it is to feel angry, hurt, let down, entrenched, confused, envious, or without hope.

Especially in cases where people have endured trauma, betrayal, or loss, the road to recovery is often precarious, and direct communication among various parties may not be the right place to start. But we can work with you to develop a course of action that will help.

We take people as they are. Everyone is entitled to be heard.

We will not ask anyone to change, hide, or sugar-coat their attitudes in order to participate in the process of problem solving and building better relationships.

People do not change their attitude about something important unless they first feel accepted and understood as they are.

We will not ask you to agree with others. We will not even ask you to like them (you may or may not). But we will ask you to understand them. And we will ask them to understand you.

There are no easy answers.

Progress comes from the application of powerful and innovative communication and problem solving principles to your specific situation.

The path is rarely clean or obvious. It is hard work – for us and for you. But when the stakes are high, the rewards are worth the effort.

Our purpose.

Our goal is to put ourselves out of business, at least vis-a-vis your conflicts. In addition to fostering better understanding, healing relationships, and solving the current business issues, we aim to equip parties with a better foundation and enhanced skills to work through their own conflicts as they go forward.

Corporate Education

When it comes to designing programs, we don’t believe that “one size fits all”. We work with you to ensure that the curriculum hits the mark, engages your team, and delivers results.

How does it work?

We partner with clients to diagnose the causes of the challenges, identify key skills to develop, and design solutions that will address the needs of the stakeholders and participants alike.

What is a workshop like?

People learn by doing. Our workshops are highly interactive, mixing presentations with collaborative working sessions on participants’ own challenges. Workshop participants provide examples of real challenges and real contexts, and these form the backbone of our programs. Case studies, exercises, one-on-one simulations, and demonstrations allow participants to practice what they’re learning, get faculty and peer coaching, and put the skills to immediate use.

How do you make it stick?

After even the most transformative workshops, it’s all too common for the learning to be lost once professionals step back into their time-pressed worlds. We help organizations develop learning curriculums that provide the support and accountability necessary to change behavior. Follow-up working sessions, exercises for on-going team discussions, wallet card job aids, preparation worksheets, and monthly reminders and assignments help change stick. In other words, professionals learn to “walk the talk” and use the skills they bring home.

Keynotes & Presentations

Whether you’re planning a conference, off-site, or working with a time-pressed audience, we offer dynamic presentations that engage audiences, challenge their thinking, and leave them with key insights to take away and apply immediately.

Keynotes

The challenges of interpersonal communication are universal, and keep audiences engaged, whether those audiences are senior leaders, rising stars, or key support staff. We talk about issues that ring true for people – giving tough feedback to direct reports, dealing with difficult clients, disagreeing with your spouse – and we present our material in a way that’s lively and engaging. We make our points by telling stories about real people in real situations. We engage the audience in exploring what’s going wrong and what we might do instead. Audiences leave the session with a new way of understanding old problems and a new vocabulary for approaching conversations they know they need to have now.

Retreats

We are often asked to join key decision-makers on partnership retreats or off-site meetings, as they grapple with important issues. A morning presentation offering vocabulary and business examples is followed by small group conversations about real, current issues, facilitated by Triad faculty. This combination reinforces core learning points and allows groups to tackle old problems with fresh energy and aligned purpose. It can also provide an opportunity to prepare for and practice an upcoming conversation, with peer support and faculty feedback.

Open Harvard Workshops

We teach open enrollment executive programs at the Harvard Negotiation Institute. We created the 5-Day Advanced Difficult Conversations™ Course to focus on tactical, interpersonal, and structural difficulties to challenging conversations.

We regularly teach in the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School’s Executive Seminar series aimed at equipping executives with additional skills to navigate their business challenges.

Additionally, in the fall, we teach a semester-length course that meets weekly called the Negotiation and Dispute Resolution seminar. This allows participants to explore negotiation concepts in-depth over the course of several months. We often have people who come to Cambridge for the semester, or travel in from New York or Washington DC weekly for the course.

Content

Difficult Conversations

Saying no. Handling conflict. Delivering bad news. Regardless of industry, geography, or seniority, we face difficult conversations every day. Handling these conversations effectively is no longer just a good idea. It’s a core competency for effective management. Conflicts that fester dampen productivity, destroy teamwork, impact morale, distort decision-making, short-circuit execution, and damage the bottom line. And the great irony, the higher up in an organization you get, the more difficult the conversations.

Based on our book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Penguin 2010, 2nd Ed.), we offer a systematic framework for understanding why some of our most important conversations are so hard and tools for handling them with less anxiety and better results.

Negotiation

Professionals negotiate internally every day — with colleagues, new recruits, clashing functions, and corporate headquarters. We negotiate externally with demanding customers and clients, government agencies, lawyers, vendors, and venture partners. The ability to effectively manage conflicting interests is crucial to individual and organizational success. Unsustainable agreements, damaged relationships, suboptimal outcomes undercut our ability to get the job done.

Based on work done at the Harvard Negotiation Project over the last 30 years, including Getting to Yes (Fisher, Ury, Patton), Getting it Done: How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge (Fisher, Sharp, Richardson), and Negotiation Analysis: The Science and Art of Collaborative Decision Making (Raiffa, Richardson, Metcalfe), we provide a cognitive framework for understanding negotiation and negotiation success and tools for negotiating mutually beneficial outcomes and bringing power and persuasiveness to bear in ways that preserve relationships.

Feedback

Feedback is crucial in developing talent, improving morale, aligning teams, solving problems, and boosting the bottom line, and so organizations invest heavily on training their people — on how to “give” feedback. And that’s useful. Yet if the feedback receiver isn’t ready or able to absorb the feedback, then there’s only so far skillfulness can go. Receivers are in control of what they let in, how they make sense of it, and whether they choose to change.

So focusing on the givers, (what we call the Push model of learning) only takes you so far. The real leverage for individual and organizational learning and change is in creating Pull — helping people get better at the challenging skill of receiving feedback so that they can drive their own learning.

This workshop is based on our book Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (even when it’s off-base, unfair, poorly delivered, and frankly, you’re not in the mood), by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen (Viking/Penguin, March 2014). We present a framework and tools for sorting through differing perceptions, regaining balance when the feedback is particularly rough, and managing common triggers so that we can learn and improve.

Influence Equation

In today’s interdependent, matrixed world, your ability to get things done depends on your ability to influence others’ thinking and behavior. How do you get what you need when it’s at the bottom of someone else’s priority list? How do you talk to your boss about why their latest idea won’t go over well with the team? How do you get things done when you have all the responsibility but no authority?

Influence is a function not only of your ability to persuade but also the causes of the other person's resistance (I=P÷R). Focusing solely on persuasion without considering resistance exacerbates situations and compromises our influence. We offer strategies for both persuading effectively and mitigating resistance.

Systems

A systems view provides unique leverage for solving complex problems and creating lasting organizational change. This type of analytical rigor helps senior leadership to uncover the complex and diverse drivers that create the challenges and problems they face. In return, it allows an organization to more accurately determine the sustainability of policy decisions, maximize the impact of investments, and avoid the pitfalls that result from the failure to see connections among seemingly unrelated factors

Adopting a systems view allows an organization to optimize the deployment of resources and investments by “connecting the dots” between short-term impacts and long-term change. A systemic program audit evaluates the degree to which the organization is allocating resources wisely. The creation of a system map allows leadership to better assess the degree to which initiatives are sustainable.

Key Skills

Developing key factors

Identifying feedback loops

Recognizing leverage points

Learning from the system

Managing structural, attitudinal, and transactional factors

Triad partners with you to understand your context and challenges – your particular leaders and what they’re up against, your industry and organizational structure, complex relationships, and the areas where people “get stuck.”

We then work with clients to build a process for moving forward, tapping our deep well of experience and cutting-edge content to create a custom program to achieve your purposes and help your leaders develop the skills necessary to achieve results. We create feedback loops to adapt and make sure we’re hitting the mark, always asking, “What works best?”

We then align the particular group with the very best faculty to meet their needs. Our faculty have diverse backgrounds, but share a common passion for excellence in teaching and in “walking the talk” – using humor and the very same skills we teach to engage the audience, to invite honest discussion, and to encourage each participant to take an honest look at what they do that works and how they can improve. For more information about our Triad team, click here.